I am going to be absolutely honest; I feel really guilty for calling myself an avid reader and not having read this novel for so long. I was browsing through my local bookshop, when another reader came, chatted with me for a little and started handing me books, telling me exactly which ones I just had to read. I had seen this book many times before, and I had never bought it, despite wanting to. I have to admit, this girl was very surprised that I hadn't read this book (and promptly told me I seriously had to read it) . As was the employee at the till when I bought it. Just everyone seems to have read this book, and so I was desperate to see what the hype was all about
About the Book
Synopsis (Goodreads)
Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.
Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.
Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises…Park.
Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.
My Review
What to say about Eleanor & Park… To be honest, the book absolutely stunned me. I put that book down a different person; I felt frazzled, as if I had been hit with a lightning bolt. Eleanor & Park is a lightning bolt of a novel.
It is full of emotion, and desperate love. Love that they want to hide, love that they want to last forever. They know, though, that love doesn't work like that.
Eleanor & Park is a book simply brimming with what love really is. At the same time as being utterly in love, there is the fact that they know that it is limited; the whole book is a total countdown to an explosion of action.
I have to say that it's an absolutely beautiful novel, written with the same elegance I know of Rainbow Rowell. She does a spectacular job of using her characters to make a reader want to believe that only the best can happen. She makes the reader expect, yet feel totally unprepared for, the worst.
I can finally say, after all this time, that I know exactly why everyone loves Eleanor & Park. I am going to award this spectacular novel:
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